Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2015 8:10:41 GMT -6
Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Was it months yet? Who knows. There wasn’t even a clock in this room - other than the one etched on to the skin of his right bicep - to mark the time by. And much as the tattoo both ticked and spoke to him on occasion, it was never designed to help him mark the hours. Sometimes it went dark. Sometimes it became light. Other times the gloom was so great he didn’t know whether it was night or day.
The uniform whiteness of his cell was, in the brightness of what was presumably day, hurting his eyes. The light coming in through the reassuringly-tough looking barred windows reflected off every surface and burned into his retinas, to the point where it felt like the only option available to him was to lay down, close his eyes and sleep. And so he did. Which started the circle again. His sleeping pattern was destroyed. There was no night and no day, just waking hours and those spent unconscious.
The pencil and paper he’d been provided with to record his thoughts, feelings and emotions - and God knows the staff who visited occasionally were very keen on him doing so - had started off covered in short stories and illustrations. More recently they’d become less ordered, darker and more violent, taking the form of scratched lines on the page rather than any recognisable language. When the lines did draw together to form a recognisable shape, it was always the same one - the damn clock. The broken clock with the shattered face, and the time forever set to 8.15. The drawings were becoming larger, more detailed, more heavily ingrained into the paper, and occasionally Rob would write “TICK TOCK” in huge, cartoonish letters next to the drawing to illustrate his point. Every so often an orderly would enter, pick the drawings up, shake their head in a manner that pitched itself somewhere between concern and patronisation, and leave, presumably to hand them off to his duty doctor. Who, he might add, seemed to change with every visit. He didn’t seem to get on with them very well.
The thing is that Riot wasn’t drawing the pictures to fuck with the staff. The longer he spent here, with no form of stimulation to entertain him, the more he could hear the clock ticking away. The longer he spent here, relying on the contents of his own imagination to transport him outside the confines of the room, the more he stared at that tattoo. And somewhere along the line, since he was forcibly shoved back into the cell at the conclusion of Ignite 200, the ticking had been accompanied by far more troubling sights and sounds. The distant cry of his abandoned son. The hectoring and vicious diatribe of his long-forgotten mother. He’d stare into that clock face and see himself, alone, slumped against the wall of his Manchester apartment thirteen years ago, lonely and broken; the final vestiges of anything good about him sucked from within his soul and replaced by something horrible. A horror that had driven him into hiding for the best part of a decade, stalking the Earth, and then just as suddenly spat him back into the world of the living, dreaming only of blood, and conquest, and vengeance. A horror that he’d not only failed to defend himself against, but had accepted into the core of his being and built a frame around. A frame that he’d named Riot.
Rob Riot. An identity constructed solely from the misery he’d trapped himself inside. And, for a while, he’d thrived on it. It allowed him to hurt people. It allowed him to take down warriors - the good, the virtuous, the kind and well meaning - and shatter them both physically and mentally. He could look into their eyes and see a fraction of his own torment reflected back at him. And he’d enjoyed it. For his first two years back in the ring, he’d positively loved it. It was who he was - his definition. The man who made it to the top by stepping on the head of anybody foolish enough to offer him a way in. And he thought he’d carry on that way forever. But then something unexpected happened. He’d felt love.
At first, it was only the adulation of the crowd. The more he’d won, the more they respected him. The more they respected him, the more they cheered. And the more they cheered, the more he’d felt, for the first time in years, a connection with other human beings. Before he knew what had hit him, he was feeding on their love instead of his own hate. His mind, a sealed box for so long, began to open, and to realise what there was around him. He had the chance to inspire rather than intimidate, to rule with kindness rather than cruelty, and to do all of this without losing a step in the ring. And at the peak of this realisation came Valora.
Valora Salinas. A woman as broken as him. Until he’d met her, he’d found it impossible to imagine anybody who hated themselves as much as he did - nor anyone so oblivious to their better qualities that they ignored them completely, and simply preferred to drown in their own guilt as opposed to accepting that there may be redemption out there for them somewhere. She’d opened herself up to him and he’d found a part of himself that he’d thought was long dead - and in return he hoped that he’d reflected the same back to her. And in the final days before he signed on the line at N.E.W to begin this doomed pursuit of Hunter, he’d dared to believe that they were in love. He himself may have been more ready to admit to it than her, but he’d felt it from her, too. She did things she didn’t have to. Trying to get him out of this God forsaken place, for example. Getting him a few hours freedom where they’d been able to grab coffee, and talk like regular human beings. But he hadn’t seen her for days (days or weeks now?). With no means of getting in contact with her, all he could do was worry. Worry that something had happened to her. Or, even worse, worry that the final revelation she’d made to him - that she’d killed her own sister - had taken her further down the rabbit hole than she’d really wanted to go, and now she’d turned on her heels and run.
This was the thing about isolation. It allows every possible scenario to run through your mind, and no means to verify a single one of them, so naturally, your brain begins to fixate on the worst. And the darker your thoughts become, the more they echo within yourself. And then came the ticking clock. And then came the drawings. And, he suspected, the more he drew the clock, the longer his stay in here was likely to be. And the closer he’d get to that “original” Riot state. The one he’d worked so hard to escape from.
The one that made him the most dangerous human being ever to step inside a wrestling ring.
One thing he was very sure of was that he hadn’t been insane when he was forced into this asylum. But he couldn’t swear to that fact now. He needed to get out of here. He needed to see Valora. He needed to kill Hunter Valentyne for getting him incarcerated in here in the first place. But any attempt to perform the third desire was going to destroy any chance of the first two. So he was stuck. And not only was he stuck, he had only a paper thin wall separating him from Hunter in the next room. He’d thought many, many times about simply diving through the wall and strangling Hunter, and he could be fairly sure that the same thing had crossed Valentyne’s mind more than once as well. The fact that the wall remained in tact was enough to tell him that they’d both arrived at the same conclusion: do it and they’re both staying here for years. And neither of them wanted that.
His thoughts on Hunter had swung back and forth, far and deep, for most of the past couple of dark-light periods since they had their last conversation through the wall. Hunter had used him. Hunter had outsmarted him. Hunter had lured him in using a plan he knew Rob would fall for, and managed to keep it on course. He hadn’t yet succeeded in destroying Rob - physically, last time out, they were more than a match for each other and the match came to a shuddering, violent, inconclusive halt - but the levels that Hunter was willing to go to just to make an example out of him were almost, almost enough to drag grudging admiration from Riot. He admired his desire to make himself something more than a World Champion - or, to quote Hunter, to ‘kill the myth’ of the championship denoting greatness. He admired his desire to create a legacy, and to use Rob’s own star to build it on. The cut-throat brazenness of the execution of the plan was something ninety nine percent of people would shy away from just because of its naked brutality, but Hunter had the balls to do it, and that took admiration, too. But every time Rob approached the point where he started to imagine that he and Hunter had something in common, the same thought returned to him. It was Hunter’s fault he was in here. It was Hunter that had taken the ability to see Valora away from him. It was Hunter who sexually assaulted a member of Riot’s own staff just to get his attention. Brave? Sure he was. But he was a dangerous lunatic with a messiah complex. And as such, he needed to be stopped. To allow Hunter to continue would be to allow himself to turn his back on something truly evil. And if he did that, he’d be as good as damned himself. And Rob had seen ‘damned’. And he never wanted to see it again.
On the topic of Hunter, though, there was a noise coming from the other side of the wall, and Rob curled his lip in disgust as it crossed his mind that the over-sexed degenerate was probably jerking off. Again. If they weren’t going to give him any form of entertainment in his room, they could at least insulate the walls a little better. Or, preferably, a lot better. He didn’t need to hear every move that monster made. Especially that sort of a noise.
Somewhere in a deeply unpleasant corner of his mind, the idea of Hunter jerking off intertwined itself with thoughts of sexual activity in general, which then took his mind back to Valora, and all three thoughts coincided in the centre of his mind’s eye for a fraction of a second. He forced himself to dismiss the thought, but it made him sick to his stomach none the less.
But then the sound grew a little louder, and Rob started to make out individual voices. Hunter had visitors? No, the voices were muffled....too muffled to be impeded by the wall alone. And there was music, and a narrator.....HEY! The fucker had.....
RIOT : [banging on the wall]
Hey! Asshole! How the fuck have you got yourself a television in there?
There was a gleeful cackle from the other side of the wall before Hunter responded, which only served to infuriate the Riot Star further.
HUNTER:
You mean you don’t? Shit, what do you do in there all day Rob? Draw stick man porn? I bet you do, don’t you. And you draw your own face on them, too. You’re that kind of ego freak.
RIOT:
Don’t ignore the fucking question. I want a television. What did you do to earn a television?
HUNTER:
You should try a little co-operation once in a while. Smile at the nurses. Give them compliments. Maybe not draw pictures that make people think you’re batshit crazy. They’re not going to give you a television if they think you’re going to try to eat the fuckin’ thing. Or break it into pieces and turn it into a weapon to attack someone with. Maybe draw less pictures of clocks and behave less like an insane person. Don’t say I never give you advice.
RIOT:
How the fuck do you know what I draw in here....who’s telling you this shit?
Hunter cackles again, and Riot pauses for a second as his thoughts begin to join up.
RIOT:
You filthy bastard. You’re fucking that orderly aren’t you? You’re fucking the orderly, she’s giving you information and you persuaded her to get you a television in return for your ‘good behaviour’. You sick freak. You have all the morality of a stray dog, you know that?
HUNTER: [with a voice full of mock-outrage]
Rob, Rob, Rob. That sounds like paranoia to me. Paranoia and narcissism. Your treatment can’t be going well. And now you’re obsessed with my sex life as well? You’re not in a good place. No wonder they want to keep you in here long term. At least....that’s what my sources tell me.
RIOT:
I find it hard to believe your sources manage to tell you very much with your dick stuffed in their mouth. Although I suppose it doesn’t take up all that much room, so she can still find a way to talk around it.
HUNTER:
That’s childish, Rob. You want to make dick jokes back and forth? Fine. We can do that all day. Actually, no we can’t, because I’m busy watching television.
Riot, still scowling, turns his back on the wall and sits in seething silence for a moment, contemplating his options. If he could no longer even trust the medical staff not to conspire against him and align with Hunter, then he couldn’t trust anybody at all. He was utterly alone in here. Which made Hunter himself, perversely, the closest thing he had to a friend inside the whole building. How the fuck did that happen?
Coinciding with this unpleasant thought, he heard a familiar voice on Hunter’s television. The voice of another man who Rob held responsible for his incarceration - and worse than that, a man who was able to have Rob released at any given moment and was choosing not to do so. Jesse Styles. Jesse Styles talking about New Edge Wrestling. Hunter was watching fucking wrestling. Fantastic....and he’d just heard his own name mentioned.
Slowly, reluctantly, Rob turned back to the wall.
RIOT:
Hunter....why is Jesse talking about me like I’m going to be on the show?
HUNTER:
Because you are on the show, you dumb fuck.
RIOT:
Well nobody’s said jack shit to me. Are you on the show?
HUNTER:
Of course I’m on the show. I AM the show. Every time. Weren’t you listening when I was talking the other day? And better than being on the show, I get to fight my beautiful wife.
RIOT:
Which one? Because I count two. Three if you want to count Alisa’s ghost seeing as you pretended she was dead just to fuck with me.
HUNTER:
Ha, very funny. Blair. I finally get my hands on Blair. It’s been a long time since we had a real, one on one date...
RIOT:
Most divorce cases are settled through court, Hunter. The fact that you not only want this one to end in violence, but openly admit to looking forward to it, says a lot about you as a person. How the staff here aren’t picking up on that aspect of your psychosis is beyond me. Oh, actually, not it isn’t, because you’re fucking the orderly.
HUNTER:
There’s that obsession with my sex life again. Who I may or may not be fucking in your own imagination has nothing to do with this. The real question here is whether I tell you who you’re up against or not.
RIOT:
I don’t give a shit. It gets me out of here. I’ll fight the entire roster gauntlet style if it means I can stare at something other than these four walls for a while. I’d welcome it.
HUNTER:
So you’re not even going to try to guess? You’re no fun, Rob. So you wouldn’t care if you were up against Valora?
Riot bristles for a moment.
RIOT:
Jesse wouldn’t do that to me. He’s already pissed me off. He’s not so dumb that he doesn’t know how far to push it.
HUNTER:
So it’s true. You really do love her.
RIOT:
I didn’t say that.
HUNTER:
You didn’t have to. Every time we talk, you give up one of your weaknesses, whether you mean to or not. And Valora Salinas is the biggest one of them all. Thank you, Rob. Very illuminating.
RIOT:
But I’m not up against her. I know that from the tone of your voice.
HUNTER:
If you must know....no, you’re not. You’ve got Seth Iser.
And this brought more quiet contemplation from Riot. Seth Iser. He knew the name, of course, as any wrestler worth their salt would. But more than knowing the name, he knew the reputation. A violent man. A castout. Sadistic. Troubled. A man who had no respect for his own body, let alone that of any opponent he went up against. There were wrestling promotions in the world who wouldn’t even allow Seth Iser in, out of fear of what he’d do to their roster. N.E.W wasn’t one of them, because Jesse liked to play with fire.
Somehow, in all his years in the ring, he’d managed to avoid crossing Seth’s path. Until now, apparently. He knew so little about him - other than the fact he wore a mask. And any wrestler who wore a mask for reasons other then tradition was doing so for one of two reasons. Either to play a role, or to hide a secret. Seth wasn’t Mexican, or Japanese. He was no luchador. So he fit into one of those two categories.
There were the roleplayers - people who had to put on a mask so they could be somebody else, like a superhero. Something greater than what they truly were. The mask allowed them anonymity, freedom to paint this alter ego with all the attributes the lack in themselves. And as this alter ego, they could do things that their mortal selves could never dream of. But they lacked substance. The whole reason they put the mask on is because of a lack of assurity in their real selves. Scratch below the surface and there was nothing there - or worse than that, less than nothing. A lonely, self-loathing soul, one which puts on the mask and claims glory but has none to show for themself when the masks comes off. The mask becomes greater than the person. The person behind the mask is a nobody. The process becomes self defeating.
And then there are the shameful - those who wear the mask because there’s something they don’t want the world to see. The mask can be an extension of a personal secrecy, something buried that the wearer seeks to defend. They don’t want to be recognised. They don’t want to be stopped in the street. They don’t want fame, or fortune, or celebrity to be attached to their real face, because they have a fear of recognition. Something within the wearer is ashamed of where they’ve come from, or defending something that must not be seen. A weakness. A concealed truth.
Iser was one of these two, and the more Riot knew about it, the more easily he’d be able to break him down mentally. But there was a very significant problem with this. Normally, he’d be able to ask Valora, and Valora would gladly share what she knew. But that channel of communication wasn’t available to him right now. Which left him with one option.
Sighing slightly, he leans a little closer to the wall.
RIOT:
Hunter....tell me everything you know about Seth Iser. You know him far better than me.
HUNTER:
Tell you what I know about him? Isn’t that the same as you saying “Help me, Hunter?” Why would I want to do something like that?
RIOT:
Because I have something you want. Or, at the very least, I can provide you with something you need.
HUNTER:
I don’t need a drawing of a clock, thanks. And you have nothing else in there. Believe me, I’d know if you did.
RIOT:
Shut up and listen for one fucking second, would you? You want to get out of here. So do I. You’ve considered every possibility. So have I. And as much as you tell me you’re going to come up with this legendary plan, you’re no closer to thinking of it than you were on the day we both got committed. If you were, you’d already be gone. You and I have no chance of making it out of here on our own terms on our own. So....
Riot clenched his teeth, still mentally yet to come to terms with the words that were about to come out of his mouth.
RIOT:
......what if I said I would help you, and we worked on this together?
Riot shut his eyes, bowed his head, and waited for a response from the other side of the wall.
The uniform whiteness of his cell was, in the brightness of what was presumably day, hurting his eyes. The light coming in through the reassuringly-tough looking barred windows reflected off every surface and burned into his retinas, to the point where it felt like the only option available to him was to lay down, close his eyes and sleep. And so he did. Which started the circle again. His sleeping pattern was destroyed. There was no night and no day, just waking hours and those spent unconscious.
The pencil and paper he’d been provided with to record his thoughts, feelings and emotions - and God knows the staff who visited occasionally were very keen on him doing so - had started off covered in short stories and illustrations. More recently they’d become less ordered, darker and more violent, taking the form of scratched lines on the page rather than any recognisable language. When the lines did draw together to form a recognisable shape, it was always the same one - the damn clock. The broken clock with the shattered face, and the time forever set to 8.15. The drawings were becoming larger, more detailed, more heavily ingrained into the paper, and occasionally Rob would write “TICK TOCK” in huge, cartoonish letters next to the drawing to illustrate his point. Every so often an orderly would enter, pick the drawings up, shake their head in a manner that pitched itself somewhere between concern and patronisation, and leave, presumably to hand them off to his duty doctor. Who, he might add, seemed to change with every visit. He didn’t seem to get on with them very well.
The thing is that Riot wasn’t drawing the pictures to fuck with the staff. The longer he spent here, with no form of stimulation to entertain him, the more he could hear the clock ticking away. The longer he spent here, relying on the contents of his own imagination to transport him outside the confines of the room, the more he stared at that tattoo. And somewhere along the line, since he was forcibly shoved back into the cell at the conclusion of Ignite 200, the ticking had been accompanied by far more troubling sights and sounds. The distant cry of his abandoned son. The hectoring and vicious diatribe of his long-forgotten mother. He’d stare into that clock face and see himself, alone, slumped against the wall of his Manchester apartment thirteen years ago, lonely and broken; the final vestiges of anything good about him sucked from within his soul and replaced by something horrible. A horror that had driven him into hiding for the best part of a decade, stalking the Earth, and then just as suddenly spat him back into the world of the living, dreaming only of blood, and conquest, and vengeance. A horror that he’d not only failed to defend himself against, but had accepted into the core of his being and built a frame around. A frame that he’d named Riot.
Rob Riot. An identity constructed solely from the misery he’d trapped himself inside. And, for a while, he’d thrived on it. It allowed him to hurt people. It allowed him to take down warriors - the good, the virtuous, the kind and well meaning - and shatter them both physically and mentally. He could look into their eyes and see a fraction of his own torment reflected back at him. And he’d enjoyed it. For his first two years back in the ring, he’d positively loved it. It was who he was - his definition. The man who made it to the top by stepping on the head of anybody foolish enough to offer him a way in. And he thought he’d carry on that way forever. But then something unexpected happened. He’d felt love.
At first, it was only the adulation of the crowd. The more he’d won, the more they respected him. The more they respected him, the more they cheered. And the more they cheered, the more he’d felt, for the first time in years, a connection with other human beings. Before he knew what had hit him, he was feeding on their love instead of his own hate. His mind, a sealed box for so long, began to open, and to realise what there was around him. He had the chance to inspire rather than intimidate, to rule with kindness rather than cruelty, and to do all of this without losing a step in the ring. And at the peak of this realisation came Valora.
Valora Salinas. A woman as broken as him. Until he’d met her, he’d found it impossible to imagine anybody who hated themselves as much as he did - nor anyone so oblivious to their better qualities that they ignored them completely, and simply preferred to drown in their own guilt as opposed to accepting that there may be redemption out there for them somewhere. She’d opened herself up to him and he’d found a part of himself that he’d thought was long dead - and in return he hoped that he’d reflected the same back to her. And in the final days before he signed on the line at N.E.W to begin this doomed pursuit of Hunter, he’d dared to believe that they were in love. He himself may have been more ready to admit to it than her, but he’d felt it from her, too. She did things she didn’t have to. Trying to get him out of this God forsaken place, for example. Getting him a few hours freedom where they’d been able to grab coffee, and talk like regular human beings. But he hadn’t seen her for days (days or weeks now?). With no means of getting in contact with her, all he could do was worry. Worry that something had happened to her. Or, even worse, worry that the final revelation she’d made to him - that she’d killed her own sister - had taken her further down the rabbit hole than she’d really wanted to go, and now she’d turned on her heels and run.
This was the thing about isolation. It allows every possible scenario to run through your mind, and no means to verify a single one of them, so naturally, your brain begins to fixate on the worst. And the darker your thoughts become, the more they echo within yourself. And then came the ticking clock. And then came the drawings. And, he suspected, the more he drew the clock, the longer his stay in here was likely to be. And the closer he’d get to that “original” Riot state. The one he’d worked so hard to escape from.
The one that made him the most dangerous human being ever to step inside a wrestling ring.
One thing he was very sure of was that he hadn’t been insane when he was forced into this asylum. But he couldn’t swear to that fact now. He needed to get out of here. He needed to see Valora. He needed to kill Hunter Valentyne for getting him incarcerated in here in the first place. But any attempt to perform the third desire was going to destroy any chance of the first two. So he was stuck. And not only was he stuck, he had only a paper thin wall separating him from Hunter in the next room. He’d thought many, many times about simply diving through the wall and strangling Hunter, and he could be fairly sure that the same thing had crossed Valentyne’s mind more than once as well. The fact that the wall remained in tact was enough to tell him that they’d both arrived at the same conclusion: do it and they’re both staying here for years. And neither of them wanted that.
His thoughts on Hunter had swung back and forth, far and deep, for most of the past couple of dark-light periods since they had their last conversation through the wall. Hunter had used him. Hunter had outsmarted him. Hunter had lured him in using a plan he knew Rob would fall for, and managed to keep it on course. He hadn’t yet succeeded in destroying Rob - physically, last time out, they were more than a match for each other and the match came to a shuddering, violent, inconclusive halt - but the levels that Hunter was willing to go to just to make an example out of him were almost, almost enough to drag grudging admiration from Riot. He admired his desire to make himself something more than a World Champion - or, to quote Hunter, to ‘kill the myth’ of the championship denoting greatness. He admired his desire to create a legacy, and to use Rob’s own star to build it on. The cut-throat brazenness of the execution of the plan was something ninety nine percent of people would shy away from just because of its naked brutality, but Hunter had the balls to do it, and that took admiration, too. But every time Rob approached the point where he started to imagine that he and Hunter had something in common, the same thought returned to him. It was Hunter’s fault he was in here. It was Hunter that had taken the ability to see Valora away from him. It was Hunter who sexually assaulted a member of Riot’s own staff just to get his attention. Brave? Sure he was. But he was a dangerous lunatic with a messiah complex. And as such, he needed to be stopped. To allow Hunter to continue would be to allow himself to turn his back on something truly evil. And if he did that, he’d be as good as damned himself. And Rob had seen ‘damned’. And he never wanted to see it again.
On the topic of Hunter, though, there was a noise coming from the other side of the wall, and Rob curled his lip in disgust as it crossed his mind that the over-sexed degenerate was probably jerking off. Again. If they weren’t going to give him any form of entertainment in his room, they could at least insulate the walls a little better. Or, preferably, a lot better. He didn’t need to hear every move that monster made. Especially that sort of a noise.
Somewhere in a deeply unpleasant corner of his mind, the idea of Hunter jerking off intertwined itself with thoughts of sexual activity in general, which then took his mind back to Valora, and all three thoughts coincided in the centre of his mind’s eye for a fraction of a second. He forced himself to dismiss the thought, but it made him sick to his stomach none the less.
But then the sound grew a little louder, and Rob started to make out individual voices. Hunter had visitors? No, the voices were muffled....too muffled to be impeded by the wall alone. And there was music, and a narrator.....HEY! The fucker had.....
RIOT : [banging on the wall]
Hey! Asshole! How the fuck have you got yourself a television in there?
There was a gleeful cackle from the other side of the wall before Hunter responded, which only served to infuriate the Riot Star further.
HUNTER:
You mean you don’t? Shit, what do you do in there all day Rob? Draw stick man porn? I bet you do, don’t you. And you draw your own face on them, too. You’re that kind of ego freak.
RIOT:
Don’t ignore the fucking question. I want a television. What did you do to earn a television?
HUNTER:
You should try a little co-operation once in a while. Smile at the nurses. Give them compliments. Maybe not draw pictures that make people think you’re batshit crazy. They’re not going to give you a television if they think you’re going to try to eat the fuckin’ thing. Or break it into pieces and turn it into a weapon to attack someone with. Maybe draw less pictures of clocks and behave less like an insane person. Don’t say I never give you advice.
RIOT:
How the fuck do you know what I draw in here....who’s telling you this shit?
Hunter cackles again, and Riot pauses for a second as his thoughts begin to join up.
RIOT:
You filthy bastard. You’re fucking that orderly aren’t you? You’re fucking the orderly, she’s giving you information and you persuaded her to get you a television in return for your ‘good behaviour’. You sick freak. You have all the morality of a stray dog, you know that?
HUNTER: [with a voice full of mock-outrage]
Rob, Rob, Rob. That sounds like paranoia to me. Paranoia and narcissism. Your treatment can’t be going well. And now you’re obsessed with my sex life as well? You’re not in a good place. No wonder they want to keep you in here long term. At least....that’s what my sources tell me.
RIOT:
I find it hard to believe your sources manage to tell you very much with your dick stuffed in their mouth. Although I suppose it doesn’t take up all that much room, so she can still find a way to talk around it.
HUNTER:
That’s childish, Rob. You want to make dick jokes back and forth? Fine. We can do that all day. Actually, no we can’t, because I’m busy watching television.
Riot, still scowling, turns his back on the wall and sits in seething silence for a moment, contemplating his options. If he could no longer even trust the medical staff not to conspire against him and align with Hunter, then he couldn’t trust anybody at all. He was utterly alone in here. Which made Hunter himself, perversely, the closest thing he had to a friend inside the whole building. How the fuck did that happen?
Coinciding with this unpleasant thought, he heard a familiar voice on Hunter’s television. The voice of another man who Rob held responsible for his incarceration - and worse than that, a man who was able to have Rob released at any given moment and was choosing not to do so. Jesse Styles. Jesse Styles talking about New Edge Wrestling. Hunter was watching fucking wrestling. Fantastic....and he’d just heard his own name mentioned.
Slowly, reluctantly, Rob turned back to the wall.
RIOT:
Hunter....why is Jesse talking about me like I’m going to be on the show?
HUNTER:
Because you are on the show, you dumb fuck.
RIOT:
Well nobody’s said jack shit to me. Are you on the show?
HUNTER:
Of course I’m on the show. I AM the show. Every time. Weren’t you listening when I was talking the other day? And better than being on the show, I get to fight my beautiful wife.
RIOT:
Which one? Because I count two. Three if you want to count Alisa’s ghost seeing as you pretended she was dead just to fuck with me.
HUNTER:
Ha, very funny. Blair. I finally get my hands on Blair. It’s been a long time since we had a real, one on one date...
RIOT:
Most divorce cases are settled through court, Hunter. The fact that you not only want this one to end in violence, but openly admit to looking forward to it, says a lot about you as a person. How the staff here aren’t picking up on that aspect of your psychosis is beyond me. Oh, actually, not it isn’t, because you’re fucking the orderly.
HUNTER:
There’s that obsession with my sex life again. Who I may or may not be fucking in your own imagination has nothing to do with this. The real question here is whether I tell you who you’re up against or not.
RIOT:
I don’t give a shit. It gets me out of here. I’ll fight the entire roster gauntlet style if it means I can stare at something other than these four walls for a while. I’d welcome it.
HUNTER:
So you’re not even going to try to guess? You’re no fun, Rob. So you wouldn’t care if you were up against Valora?
Riot bristles for a moment.
RIOT:
Jesse wouldn’t do that to me. He’s already pissed me off. He’s not so dumb that he doesn’t know how far to push it.
HUNTER:
So it’s true. You really do love her.
RIOT:
I didn’t say that.
HUNTER:
You didn’t have to. Every time we talk, you give up one of your weaknesses, whether you mean to or not. And Valora Salinas is the biggest one of them all. Thank you, Rob. Very illuminating.
RIOT:
But I’m not up against her. I know that from the tone of your voice.
HUNTER:
If you must know....no, you’re not. You’ve got Seth Iser.
And this brought more quiet contemplation from Riot. Seth Iser. He knew the name, of course, as any wrestler worth their salt would. But more than knowing the name, he knew the reputation. A violent man. A castout. Sadistic. Troubled. A man who had no respect for his own body, let alone that of any opponent he went up against. There were wrestling promotions in the world who wouldn’t even allow Seth Iser in, out of fear of what he’d do to their roster. N.E.W wasn’t one of them, because Jesse liked to play with fire.
Somehow, in all his years in the ring, he’d managed to avoid crossing Seth’s path. Until now, apparently. He knew so little about him - other than the fact he wore a mask. And any wrestler who wore a mask for reasons other then tradition was doing so for one of two reasons. Either to play a role, or to hide a secret. Seth wasn’t Mexican, or Japanese. He was no luchador. So he fit into one of those two categories.
There were the roleplayers - people who had to put on a mask so they could be somebody else, like a superhero. Something greater than what they truly were. The mask allowed them anonymity, freedom to paint this alter ego with all the attributes the lack in themselves. And as this alter ego, they could do things that their mortal selves could never dream of. But they lacked substance. The whole reason they put the mask on is because of a lack of assurity in their real selves. Scratch below the surface and there was nothing there - or worse than that, less than nothing. A lonely, self-loathing soul, one which puts on the mask and claims glory but has none to show for themself when the masks comes off. The mask becomes greater than the person. The person behind the mask is a nobody. The process becomes self defeating.
And then there are the shameful - those who wear the mask because there’s something they don’t want the world to see. The mask can be an extension of a personal secrecy, something buried that the wearer seeks to defend. They don’t want to be recognised. They don’t want to be stopped in the street. They don’t want fame, or fortune, or celebrity to be attached to their real face, because they have a fear of recognition. Something within the wearer is ashamed of where they’ve come from, or defending something that must not be seen. A weakness. A concealed truth.
Iser was one of these two, and the more Riot knew about it, the more easily he’d be able to break him down mentally. But there was a very significant problem with this. Normally, he’d be able to ask Valora, and Valora would gladly share what she knew. But that channel of communication wasn’t available to him right now. Which left him with one option.
Sighing slightly, he leans a little closer to the wall.
RIOT:
Hunter....tell me everything you know about Seth Iser. You know him far better than me.
HUNTER:
Tell you what I know about him? Isn’t that the same as you saying “Help me, Hunter?” Why would I want to do something like that?
RIOT:
Because I have something you want. Or, at the very least, I can provide you with something you need.
HUNTER:
I don’t need a drawing of a clock, thanks. And you have nothing else in there. Believe me, I’d know if you did.
RIOT:
Shut up and listen for one fucking second, would you? You want to get out of here. So do I. You’ve considered every possibility. So have I. And as much as you tell me you’re going to come up with this legendary plan, you’re no closer to thinking of it than you were on the day we both got committed. If you were, you’d already be gone. You and I have no chance of making it out of here on our own terms on our own. So....
Riot clenched his teeth, still mentally yet to come to terms with the words that were about to come out of his mouth.
RIOT:
......what if I said I would help you, and we worked on this together?
Riot shut his eyes, bowed his head, and waited for a response from the other side of the wall.